When the German neurologist Korbinian Brodmann first sliced and mapped the human brain more than a century ago he identified 50 distinct regions in the crinkly surface called the cerebral cortex that governs much of what makes us human.

Now researchers have updated the 100-year-old map in a scientific tour de force which reveals that the human brain has at least 180 different regions that are important for language, perception, consciousness, thought, attention and sensation.

The landmark achievement hands neuroscientists their most comprehensive map of the cortex so far, one that is expected to supersede Brodmann’s as the standard researchers use to talk about the various areas of the brain.

Scientists at Washington University in St Louis created the map by combining highly-detailed MRI scans from 210 healthy young adults who had agreed to take part in the Human Connectome Project, a massive effort that aims to understand how neurons in the brain are connected.

The image shows the pattern of brain activation (red, yellow) and deactivation (blue, green) in the brain’s left hemisphere when listening to stories while in an MRI scanner. Photograph: Matthew F. Glasser, David C. Van Essen

Most previous maps of the human brain have been created by looking at only one aspect of the tissues, such as how the cells look under a microscope, or how active areas become when a person performs a certain task. But maps made in different ways do not always look the same, which casts doubt on where one part of the brain stops and another starts.

Writing in the journal Nature, Matthew Glasser and others describe how they combined scans of brain structure, function and connectivity to produce the new map, which confirmed the existence of 83 known brain regions and added 97 new ones. Some scans were taken while patients simply rested in the machine, while others were recorded as they performed maths tasks, listened to stories, or categorised objects, for example by stating whether an image was of a tool or an animal.

A new map of the human brain could be the most accurate yet, as it combines all sorts of different kinds of data. This might finally solve a century of disagreements over the shapes and positions of different brain areas.

The more detailed map, which will be made freely available for all, should help scientists working in the field of neuroimaging be more certain about the areas of the brain they see activity in, or notice problems with, when scanning patients and healthy volunteers.

The map will have an immediate impact on fundamental brain research, but will also quickly be taken up by neurosurgeons who can use the scientists’ computer algorithm to identify all of the different brain regions in patients they are about to operate on. “That will help in surgical planning to avoid areas that are involved in movement, and in understanding and producing language,” Glasser said.

A map of myelin content (red, yellow are high myelin; indigo and blue are low myelin) in the left hemisphere of the brain. Photograph: Matthew F. Glasser, David C. Van Essen

In the longer term, and potentially many years away, detailed brain maps are expected to help neuroscientists to understand how things go wrong in people with a range of disorders, such as dementia and schizophrenia.

Simon Eickhoff, a neuroscientist at the Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine at Jülich in Germany said the work was a “seminal step” towards reliable and comprehensive maps of the human brain and to understanding brain organisation.

Timothy Behrens, a professor of computational neuroscience at Oxford University added: “The extraordinary amount of effort in doing this and doing this so beautifully makes it an outstanding piece of work. It will lead to a profound change in how people think about the brain, and become the default way of describing human brain activity for years to come.”